


Another Face In The Crowd

by violent_ends



Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Canon Divergence - Lucifer (TV) Season 04, Emotional Lucifer Morningstar (Lucifer TV), Episode Related, Episode: s04e04 All About Eve, F/M, Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Lucifer (TV) Season/Series 04, Lucifer Morningstar (Lucifer TV) Needs A Hug, Lucifer Morningstar (Lucifer TV) Whump, Self-Harm, What-If, Whump, Whumptober, Whumptober 2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-20
Updated: 2019-10-20
Packaged: 2020-12-24 11:56:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21099068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/violent_ends/pseuds/violent_ends
Summary: What if the woman Lucifer sees on the dancefloor isn't Eve, but someone who only looks like her?Prompt #29 of Whumptober 2019: numb





	Another Face In The Crowd

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PandaInTheStars](https://archiveofourown.org/users/PandaInTheStars/gifts).

> Prompt suggested by PandaInTheStars, to whom I gift this angsty mess.

He's still feeling, which just won’t do. Chloe’s words echo in his mind, unbidden and without pause, like a curse he can’t escape, a spell he cannot lift.

_Because I'm terrified._

_I don’t know._

_I don’t know._

_I don’t know._

Which isn’t a _no_, but… after everything they’ve been through, she doesn’t _know_.

Deep down, he knows he should be patient. And he might have been. Even after a month of silence, of uncertainty, of despair – even then, he got it, he understood. If she’d come back and said they were done, he would have accepted it (who is he kidding, he wouldn’t have, but he would have left her alone to suffer in silence, brooding on top of his tower like the king of some tragic play). If she’d asked him to just keep working together, he would have agreed to it, secretly hoping that in time she would gravitate toward him again.

But she said yes, when he asked her out. She said yes, when he asked her if she was fine. She said _No, Lucifer, I haven’t talked to anyone about you_, and they were all lies, lies, _lies_. A sham, a con, a deception, a trick to get him to lower his defenses, as if they weren’t already nonexistent when it came to her. She carried death in her purse and put a smile on her face and for a moment- _For a moment, I was helping him try to send you back to Hell._

A moment. As if that wasn’t enough.

Betrayal burns down his throat with more intensity and harshness than the alcohol he’s trying to numb himself with, scorching and toxic like acid – isn’t the point of this bloody substance to make him _stop_ feeling?

The people around him, when he decides to go down to Lux to fetch some more, remind him of the Uriel fallout: of the moment when he lost count of how many shots he drank, how many women he kissed, how many lines he snorted. He feels different now, and hates himself for it, for the fact that as he looks into the crowd, no one even registers to him anymore. The crowd-pleaser turned into _Chloe_-pleaser, the Devil reduced to a pitiful, hole-in-one-sock mess of a man.

Then, as he's about to make his way upstairs again, something catches his eye. No, _someone_. He leaves the bottles on the bar without giving it much thought and starts walking, his eyes easily adjusting to the intermittent lights of his club – a club he barely graces with his presence anymore if not to play, which he could just do in the penthouse, but he’s weak that way; weak in craving a connection with people who simply don’t give a single damn about him unless they want to get a favor or a song or a fuck out of him.

But not Eve. No, Eve never asked him for anything – one could say she gave too much. Pleasure and laughter and kindness, even _after_, even as he secretly watched her leave the Garden from behind a tree, too spiteful back then to feel like he had to be blamed for anything. And even now, he wouldn’t say it was so. Free will had consequences, as he very well knew, and she had known as well. She looked back at him before taking her first step into a much harsher world and _smiled_, unbeknownst to hunched, repentant, crying Adam walking in front of her – always blind to what was happening right under his nose, a quality he certainly passed on to his male descendants.

Lucifer gapes and stares at the lines of her back as she moves on the dancefloor, dressed in white like the perfect bride she never was. What he’s seeing is impossible, but then again, he should know better than to think such a word holds any meaning anymore. He'll figure out what this means later: for now he’s just glued to the spot, like a moment frozen by Amenadiel’s breath, but around him the world is spinning and time is flowing fast, not paying him any mind just like the people around him, unfazed by how he looks (do they really not care, or did he make such a fool of himself in the past that this is considered progress?).

The beat drops and picks up the pace again, and Eve throws her head back almost in rapture; he can't even begin to imagine what this must feel like for her, this sense of liberation and abandon. Or maybe he can. He knows it’s exhilarating in a way that will lessen in time, but now, in this moment, she is free. More than she’s ever been in her life, maybe even more than she felt with him. And so he stalls before approaching her, because freedom is a spectacle nothing can compare to, and humans, as much as they think otherwise, rarely ever let themselves embrace it.

She never danced like this in the Garden, back when there was no music in the world to enjoy, when the luxury of harmonies and melodies was reserved to the heavenly host, and therefore precluded to him. She never danced like this but her hair moved the same way above him, her hands carding through it, lifting up that tangled mess of black curls only to let it cascade over her naked breasts one moment later. And she was as carefree back then as she seems to be now, writhing and swaying to the rhythm of the beat as she once did to the rocking of his hips.

“Eve?” he finally calls from behind her, loud enough so she can hear. He doesn’t know how this is possible, doesn’t understand how she can be here, at Lux, on Earth, _alive_, but he could always ask her: such a conversation will certainly make for an adequate distraction, and he finds himself comforted by this sudden curiosity, this easily fixable problem, this soon-to-be-solved doubt.

She turns around, surprised, then takes one look at him from head to toe.

“Sorry, no, but you can call me however you like" she smiles seductively, moving closer, and Lucifer steps back.

She’s not her. Of course she’s not her. Why the _hell_ did he even think it could be her? And why does it matter that she isn’t?

He stumbles backwards, turns around and quickly weaves through the dancing crowd to go back the way he came from. He can barely form a thought with how loud his breathing feels in his own ears, head spinning, but he still has the presence of mind to grab the two bottles he left on the bar and take them with him up the steps of the staircase and into the elevator. There is a buzzing, almost thrumming feeling of inexplicable _frustration_ mounting inside him, hands shaking around the necks of the bottles he holds to his chest.

Once inside the penthouse, he leaves one on the bar and opens the other. He gulps down the vodka as if it’s water, stops to rake a hand through his hair and goes again on repeat. He doesn’t even know _why_ it’s such a big deal that it wasn’t her, when he hadn’t thought about her in _centuries_, when she’s not even the woman he's moping for like some heartbroken teenager.

And it’s not a big deal, truly, it isn’t, but it’s the depth of his stupidity that enrages him: why would Eve even be here when she’s in Heaven, cursed to a life of tribulation but _forgiven_ in the end, unlike him? Him, the snake, the tempter, when in truth, he actually _hesitated_. She was his first – first woman, lover, human – and he was, well, young, in a way. But she was sad and he was angry and she said _What are you waiting for?_ when their lips were about to touch, wild and determined and impatient, when there still was time for him to pull back and leave her innocence untarnished and her virtue unspoiled.

He fools himself into thinking that Eve would understand him, now; that she wouldn’t recoil and look away from the face of the monster he is, when the truth is that he cannot know because he never actually showed her. And it’s so mean and so beneath him to compare, when these two women he’s now thinking about couldn’t be more different, for better or for worse. But it was one trick too many, the one that deceived him into thinking it was her dancing (just a simple mistake, maybe confusion from the flashing lights, maybe the booze doing its bloody job at exactly the wrong moment), and he feels betrayed, _again_, this time by his own eyes.

The bottle of vodka, once it’s empty, crashes against the wall behind the bar and takes many more along with it, an explosion of liquid and shards of glass that doesn’t give him any satisfaction. It’s not enough, so he doesn’t pretend otherwise. The biggest thing that might get him to feel something that isn’t _this_ is the low glass table between the couches, so he stalks toward it with sudden intent, his movements way less sloppy than a moment ago. He lifts it up with a growl and slams it back on the floor with so much force that pieces actually fly in his direction, bouncing back from his skin instead of piercing it.

Oh, and isn’t that the most painful reminder of all.

He shakes with quiet fury as he stares at the mess he made, but let’s be honest, the mess is much bigger than this, and unlike these shards, it cut deep – not only into him, but into Chloe. Because Lucifer broke her like he broke this useless piece of furniture, like he broke Eve, as much as he knows: she’d just lost Abel, when he tried to approach her again years later, and he got so scared by the magnitude of her sorrow that he flew away and never sought her out again. This is who he is. This is what he does.

He breaks things. Hearts. People. Maybe it’s only fair for him to be broken in return.

And so he tries, oh, he _tries_, but the glass doesn’t even scratch his skin when he kneels on the floor and presses a sharp point against his palm with such viciousness that, if he was anyone else, would make the glass dig right through his hand and emerge on the other side. His unblemished palm stares back at him, mocking him with the reminder of the Detective’s absence – a stupid thing to wallow about when he was the one who chased her away in the end (_Then I've got my answer_, and the answer is that there is no answer).

But he _is_ stupid, after all, stupid for believing Chloe could actually accept him, stupid for thinking Eve – human Eve, dead Eve, heavenly Eve – would go through the trouble of finding him for whatever reason. Why would she? A creation by the hand of God Himself, the mother of all mankind, leaving paradise a _second_ time for his lovely company? Who does he _think_ he is, seriously? Has he really developed an angelic ego that might rival Amenadiel’s at this point?

The tip of the glass presses repeatedly against his palm: he’s moving it up and down in the air now, trying to jam it into his skin and fully knowing it won’t happen, but maybe if he insists it will at least _hurt_. If he can’t get numb, then let him have pain, a pain that is physical, palpable, _fixable_. Instead he hurts but in the wrong place, deep in his chest as if someone thrust a demon blade in it and forgot to take it out.

He loses control of his breathing, feels his heart pump blood too fast to keep up, and with every new breath he hears Chloe crying, saying she is a nobody when she isn’t (not to him, why can’t she just _see_ that?), and then Eve doing the same, cradling her son’s body in her arms – which wasn’t his fault, it wasn’t, but maybe her young boys would have been happy if they’d stayed in the Garden, untouched by sin and uncorrupted by trivial jealousies. Maybe what he did, what they _both_ did, sealed not only their fates but many other's.

He manages to get to his feet and drag himself to the bar for the second bottle, chugging its content as he sits on the floor. From this position he can see the whole expanse of the penthouse, from the remnants of the table to the window pane he stared at to turn away from Chloe.

_Will I ever see you again?_, Eve had asked.

_I'll come looking for you_, he had lied – no, not lied, because he did look.

_Lucifer, you’re not that guy_, Chloe had said.

_But what if I am that guy?_, he had replied.

And at the end of the day… isn’t he?


End file.
